Daniel Ricciardo says Renault is having to stop performance development in order to try and resolve its reliability issues.
Renault has suffered numerous failures during the 2015 season so far, with Ricciardo himself on his fourth power unit of the year in Barcelona, meaning he will already get a penalty if he uses one more. Having faced so many issues, Ricciardo says Renault has prioritised solving its reliability problems rather than finding more power.
”They keep working and try and find what they can,” Ricciardo said. “Obviously for us, performance is one thing, reliability is another thing and that is the first thing we need to try and address. We want to try and get more pace but I think reliability for now is [the focus]. They have taken some steps to try and get some more mileage out of these engines and postpone our penalty as long as possible.”
Ricciardo also says the Barcelona weekend will be spent trying to analyse any performance fixes.
“I think for now the performance side is perhaps not going full steam ahead because of the reliability issues. I think the main stuff we are trying to resolve this weekend is reliability. With the four engine we need to get this as far as it can go. That extra half-tenth performance we will have to put aside until we are 100 per cent sure with what is happening with reliability.”
Red Bull’s mileage in FP1 was limited to 16 laps in total, with Ricciardo spending most of the session in the pits with a power unit problem.
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